Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3)

by Bilof, Vincenzo

  Even though she couldn’t see him, she could feel him. She had walked across Detroit to find him, but instead encountered an emotionally unstable priest and the redhead, Mina. She also encountered the woman who killed her.

  She was supposed to be dead.

  Rose was dead.

  And Jim was here. Watching her.

  This body wasn’t hers. This life didn’t belong to her. Jim spoke again, but his voice was an echo.

  Swirling. Swirling. The darkness swirled around everything. Starlight trailed like fingernail scars upon concrete. Rose was near an open window. She was near an open window, and the darkness beyond was touched by thin horizons of light. The summer air carried with it the smell of damp lumber and mildew.

  Was she awake now?

  This body was not hers. This was Mina’s body.

  “I’ve waited for you,” Jim said.

  “You did this to me.”

  “No. I did it for you.”

  This skin. This body. This hair. Not hers. Not hers.

  Vega had shoved the sword into her stomach, and she bled out.

  And there had been hands. So many hands.

  “Let me show you,” Jim said.

  Where was he? His hand wrenched her head back, a fistful of her crinkly red hair in his fist. He was behind her, but she couldn’t see him. How long must she wait? How long had she been dead?

  One year, the demon voice said. Give or take a week or two. You like your new body? Believe it. Believe this is happening. The sooner you believe, the sooner we can have our fun.

  She had died to be with Jim, and here he was. Through death, and somehow, she was in another woman’s body; she could be with him. She had paid a price, and her mind was everywhere at once. She was not in control.

  “Look at me,” Rose said. “Let me see you.”

  “Will you beg?”

  “I don’t…”

  What could she say? She was with him. In a body that didn’t belong to her, but still, she was with him. He brought her back. She meant something to him.

  Better to be with him than to be nothing. Better to be with the man she wanted more than anything than to be gone from this world.

  His grotesque desires were the catalyst behind her transformation. In his scheming mind, he likely planned this out. She was never meant to be with him, at least, not in the body she knew. Her arms and legs were stiff and awkward, as if she was wearing a snowsuit that was too tight on her. If only he would hold her, tell her everything was going to be okay.

  “Now you will see,” Jim said.

  His voice.

  His voice was everywhere.

  “Tell me why,” she said.

  “Why.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There is nothing to tell you.”

  “I waited for you to come back. And you left me to die. I know you left me to die. Tell me. I deserve to know.”

  “Deserve?”

  “You survived Egypt.”

  “My flesh survived.”

  “Don’t be so fucking cryptic. You watched me die at Selfridge. You were with that girl. I know who she was. I can hear her… she’s in my head… what have you done?”

  Jim had survived that mission and never came back to find her like he promised, and here he was, playing his poetry games with her. They had made no commitment to each other; she was not entitled to his attention or whatever he gave her that passed for love. Whatever it was they shared, whatever it was they had tried to define or not define—he would deny it all now. But he brought her back from the dead somehow, so he must feel something in the depths of his cold soul.

  She had wanted him to love her, to say that he loved her, to say that she meant everything to him.

  Jim’s fingers manipulated her head, slowly twisting it around to face a jagged mirror. In the mirror, she did not see her face.

  She saw Mina’s face.

  “This is not my face,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing to me…”

  “Are you going to pray now?”

  “Why would I pray? What have you done to me? What have you done?”

  “Some of your victims have asked you the same question. How did you respond? How shall I respond? Your mind is nothing more than a persona I have designed. You are my weapon. You are my edge.”

  She watched him slam the mirror into her stomach. She watched as it cut into Mina’s stomach, not her stomach.

  Our stomach.

  The demon spoke. The demon was inside of her.

  So it wasn’t all a nightmare. It wasn’t just a nightmare. Real. This was real. The end of the world was real, Jim was real, the demon was real, Mina’s nightmares were real. Mina’s memories were real.

  There was no sensation as the mirror cut into her stomach. Jim churned it against the skin, and she grabbed his wrists. Now she could see his face. Now she could see Jim Traverse.

  Instead of looking at him, she watched the mirror’s edge cut. Deeper and deeper into the stomach.

  “You are more beautiful than you have ever been,” Jim said.

  If the darkness could make a sound, it would be the sound of his voice.

  She didn’t know who she was.

  We know who you are.

  Linda’s memory was gone.

  Mina was gone.

  We’re all here with you.

  The green eyes of a dead woman stared through the face that Rose now controlled, a face that she now owned. She looked at Jim. She looked at him and wanted his hands all over her. She wanted the heat of his body pressing her, pushing her, pushing into her. She wanted everything he could do to her. Everything he had ever done to her. Every crime. Every sensation. Every confession.

  Perfectly-chiseled bone structure. Eyes made of glaciers. Jim Traverse had promised her genocide if they could be alone to walk along the broken skulls of a murdered civilization. Hand in hand, they would walk through the smoldering ashes of each city. Paris, London, Tokyo; he had written a poetic treatise once on the stinking pit of Mexico City, its writhing squalor of disease and crime. While Rose and Jim both assassinated people for money, they were never far from each other’s minds. At least, he had convinced her of such.

  How could two people so devoted to murder be so devoted to each other? Rose had always questioned it, and now she had become a victim of his madness.

  Jim tried to set the jagged mirror inside of her stomach, his hands removing slippery, wet organs that had already begun to rot. Where did the organs come from? They were Mina’s organs, weren’t they?

  The rebirth was complete, the demon said, wonder evident in its voice. Together, we can show him how much you are willing to love him.

  Mina’s ropy intestines were between Jim’s fingers, like coiled noodles in a tomato soup mix. Ropy stomach organs slipped over his hands and flopped into the bloody hole that used to contain her stomach.

  “Do you like it?” Jim asked her. “I made this for you. I know that I told you about Georgia Cone before I left you. I told you that she made me, like I have made you. Do you know anything about yourself? Do you know who you were before we met? Can you remember the first time we met?”

  Look at his smirk, his narrow eyes, his smooth face.

  Memories.

  Who was she?

  There are so many things for us to do together, the demon said. Do you love him? Do you want him inside you? Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted? Now you can live forever. Now you can grow old together and participate in mass-genocide.

  Millions of people were already dead.

  Rose felt like she was falling, but the body she now owned remained inert. She felt like she was falling, the air enveloping her, heart caught in her throat, mouth wide.

  Mina had commanded the zombies. Rose remembered Mina taking control of them somehow, as she had stopped a horde of the dead from devouring them.

  Did Rose control them?

  See what we can see, the demon said. You were made for this moment. We were made for each othe
r.

  How could Jim do this to her? What a fool she had been to believe there was some semblance of humanity in him, some measure of empathy buried inside his twisted soul.

  Do you think you were an innocent little girl? the demon asked. Oh, such a sweet little thing you were. But you wouldn’t remember. It won’t help you to remember. Mina is in here with us. Mina is waiting for you to give her body back. She’ll take you away from your precious Jim.

  And she could scream back at the terrible voice inside of her head.

  This isn’t about Jim!

  Really? She heard the demon’s contemptuous laughter. Stupid bitch.

  She was still falling. Her vision swirled again, the darkness twisting around her. Jim was talking, his voice muffled as if he were talking and they were both underwater.

  I never wanted this, she said to the demon.

  Yes you did. Oh yes, you wanted it badly. And now you have it. You have everything.

  Wholesale slaughter of the human race. Jim had talked about it as nothing more than a fleeting fantasy, but it was something that he didn’t quite understand about himself. Like a sexual fetish unrealized, nothing more. But how long ago was that?

  I want out, she said. I’ve been used. Let me go. I would rather not be here. I would rather not be. I don’t want any part of this game.

  How can you forget everything you and Jim have shared? You owe everything to him. Your emotions, your existence, your skills. You were made in his image, and he has made you again.

  You’re not a demon. This is some kind of psychosis. I’ve gone insane.

  But even that explanation was rather silly.

  It was the only thing that made sense, in a world that didn’t make sense, in a world in which she was supposed to be dead. A world in which almost everyone was dead.

  Okay, the voice said to her. I’m not a demon. You got me figured out. I’m just a little voice inside your head.

  Wouldn’t it be better for her if the demon was real? What was the alternative? Maybe it would be better to just go with it.

  Just go with it, the demon said. Yeah. I’m here, baby. Jump into my arms. Let me sing you David Bowie songs.

  David Bowie. Why did that sound familiar?

  She was falling. She couldn’t see, and she was falling.

  Ground Control to Major Tom. Can you hear me, Major Tom?

  She could watch the memories unfold again. Linda in the shopping mall, hugging her knees close to her chest. Weeping as her savior approached, a dark woman with a sniper rifle.

  Then she could see something else. Entire fields littered with hunks of bloody meat. Human meat. As if a giant had picked up entire groups of people and ground them into a pulp in its fists and then dropped the pieces onto the ground. A bright red field of blood and skin. There was no sun. The plain of human waste did not have a sun hovering over it, and the sky was not dark.

  You’re not real, she said. None of this is happening.

  Oh, you’re such a rational young gal, ain’t cha?

  You don’t sound like a demon. You’re a joke. Mocking me.

  Love. The man she had loved stood over her, his hands messy with the blood of the body that did not belong to her.

  “Am I a joke, darling?” Jim said.

  Rose looked into his face again, her consciousness ripped away from the nightmare imagery. This man she had loved—despite how much she denied it, despite how much she told herself that love was not real, that people like her were incapable of such need—smeared a wet, sloppy mess of organs over Mina’s face.

  Her face.

  And she could feel him now, pressing against her thigh.

  Falling again, and she physically reached for Jim, grabbed his shoulders, drawing him close. She wanted to tell him to stop her from falling.

  He was inside her. Warm, strong. And she was dry. Completely dry. Worse: she could not feel anything except the pressure of his insertion.

  A new flood of images washed over her.

  Lying on a bed, wearing fishnets, black skirt, black eyeliner, purple lipstick, ink-black hair, forearms covered in bracelets. Who was this girl? Oddly familiar. Linda maybe?

  Posters all over the room. Out-of-place rock stars, old rock stars, classic rock stars. Rose knew the girl on the bed wasn’t in the distant past because this was not a residual image, but a sort of real memory, as if she couldn’t possibly have made it up; this memory existed in someone’s memory, maybe Mina’s, maybe Linda’s, maybe it was the demon’s trick. It was almost impossible to decide what to do, what to think. She was used to processing information quickly in her mercenary experiences, and this experience diluted her senses, her thoughts.

  One poster featured Kurt Cobain sitting on a stool wearing ripped up jeans, hair over his eyes. How normal. How simple. How easy it was to understand this girl. She obeyed the designs of an archetype. Another poster was David Bowie, the Thin White Duke in his 8o’s mode. Bowie wore his thin suit, his torso like a perfect triangle tucked into fabric, his blond hair like a fire brushing against an evening sky, or in this case, a stage. He was on a stage, singing into the microphone, leaning forward into the camera lens.

  “Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” David Bowie said. His mouth did not move, but it was Bowie’s voice speaking to her from the poster. “Perhaps you shall consider my insatiable lust for genocide something archaic, something spoken in Latin or broken into Homeric verse. Ah yes, demons are old things, ancient things, speaking dead languages. We have not evolved. Evil has not evolved. I am not evil. I’m nothing more than a spirit who thinks we have something in common. We both want to kill everyone. I think that’s a special bond. I’ve replaced Mina. Used her up. But I still need her body. And let me speak from a more contemporary perspective: I will degrade you, spit on you, urinate on you, torture you, speak to you in the accent of a Spaniard roasting alive on a stake during the Inquisition. I will be whatever I choose to hurt you, over and over again, but I don’t have to do much. You see, you are used to hurting yourself. Your soul is already ruined. I don’t have to do anything but sit here and enjoy the show. I will be whatever I need to be. You are mine, and I shall eat the living with Mina’s nightmare.”

  Falling again. David Bowie had talked to her. None of it made sense. None of it was in the least bit horrifying because it was too absurd. Yet, she was going through these delusions, suffering them uncontrollably.

  Another delusion. She was in front of a window that looked into a church. She watched a man walking between rows of polished mahogany pews. Candlelight shades of light crumbling shadows against sharp walls. Father Joe limping, muttering to himself in Spanish. Father Joe, the emotionally unstable priest who had saved her life, carrying her through a crowd of zombies.

  There was something wrong, and she could feel it. No. She could smell it. His presence was like a bright beacon floating at the edge of a calm oceanic horizon, and his scent was forever, like the ocean’s salty smell. The ocean didn’t smell salty, did it?

  Father Joe was hurt, and she could hear a thousand more thoughts, a thousand more voices. Screaming voices. Hurt voices. Tear-choked voices. Children. The elderly. Infants. Everybody. Everybody at once. Everyone who had ever lived. Everyone who had died. Everyone who had been killed by Mina’s nightmare-epidemic.

  Show Father Joe how much you miss him.

  Rose didn’t know who said it, but the voice was louder than the rest.

  Inside of her, somewhere, an ocean moved.

  FATHER JOE

  Always the best part of his day, out here in the quiet. The garbage hole was a few yards behind him, and he liked to sit on its edge and look down into the community’s waste pile. He liked to watch the twitching corpses that he had thrown down there when he was done with them.

  When he was done with them.

  Father Joe had removed his cassock and stood among the freeway’s ruined vehicles with his muscle-tight body. He climbed onto the roof of a car and surveyed the area.

 
There. Just one of them.

  He rubbed his thick beard. How long since his last shower? Everyone alive stank. If someone was clean they would obviously come from somewhere else, which happened once or twice. They walked down the street like tourists, and there was the possibility that maybe one or two of the zombies that had walked into the neighborhood were actually living people.

  Which only meant that people were still dying.

  Mina had destroyed herself, or so it seemed. She had controlled the dead, and in the end, she managed to help Father Joe and the others. But she wanted to die, and Father Joe helped her. She no longer wanted the power, whatever it was. And he could only begin to guess what her power actually was.

  The living dead did not attack. Only the rotted ones, creatures made by people who had watched Jim Traverse’s video, attacked.

  Mina’s mind had been inside the dead body of a big guy wearing a heavy metal T-shirt, and the corpse had gestured that it wanted to have its head twisted around, severing the brain stem from the central nervous system. He knew how to do that. His fists had done that before, long ago in the boxing ring.

  That’s why he was here.

  It never dawned on him that he committed a serious sin. Helping someone commit suicide; it seemed God had presented an opportunity for him to do something right for once. For a Catholic priest, Father’s priorities were pretty screwed up.

  Or maybe his sense of faith was completely screwed up.

  Now he was running around without his shirt and collar. How much vanity could one priest have? He needed to stop convincing himself that he was always right. That was his problem; stay the course, no matter how many people died along the way. And forget about guilt. Just keep doing what you do, Father Joe.

  He leapt off the car and wound his way through the cars on the bridge. He jotted, doing his best to run in good form, doing his best to run nimbly without stopping, pushing himself to run between a valley of open car doors. An obstacle course. He had to make sure he didn’t trip on garbage. He had to move his knees through those narrow enclosures between cars.

  When he found the zombie, he was greeted by a surprise.